Friday 18th November
Read John 5:8-10
“Then Jesus said to him, ‘Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.’ 9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked.
The day on which this took place was a Sabbath, 10 and so the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.’” (NIVUK)
What rules do you have that aren’t really rules at all but you still keep in order to feel like you are OK with God? We all have them. One person may never drink alcohol whilst another might refrain from going to any movie with a classification higher than PG. One person might deliberately drive 5km/h below the speed limit at all times whilst another might always wear a tie to church. One person may spend 5 minutes in quiet devotion when they wake up each day whilst another may give 10% of everything they earn to charity. None of these actions are wrong in themselves, and in many cases they are good and godly acts, but it is immensely dangerous to consider that if we only ‘colour within the lines’ we are ‘right with God’. It may generate a false sense of ‘divine security’.
The Torah maintained that ‘work’ on the Sabbath involved continuing to undertake your normal employment on the day of rest. If you were a carpenter, then to saw wood on the Sabbath was to break the Law. However, the Jews had created 39 categories of ‘work’ that were forbidden, amongst which, moving something from one place to another, such as carrying your bed/bedding, was one of those forbidden actions. They had examined at the Law and sought to create a boundary within which they could maintain ‘rightness with God’. If you did none of those 39 actions on the Sabbath, you had kept it. Looked at this way, the invalid man was breaking the Sabbath. Looked at the way the Law intended, he was not ‘breaking’ anything at all.
Joy and delight in the grace of God is entirely appropriate on the Sabbath – it is a boundary designed to free us to rest in Him. The Sabbath was never meant to be ring-fenced by a morality that leads to false righteousness. Religious observance rather than relational rest should be avoided as much as we can.
